I understand that Blender generally uses a very unique approach to the GUI, which needs to be learned. No problem here!

But can anyone tell me why a sophisticated software like Blender lets you exit from a project/the program after working in it for a lenghty period of time without even asking you if you'd like to save your work before quitting?

Yes, I do save my documents regularly (why not [Ctrl] + S like the rest of the world?) and yes, I know that you can engage the Auto Save feature in Blender. Still: would introducing a simple "Your project has not been saved. Would you like to save it now?" dialog (approximately 3 lines of source code, I reckon) really be asked too much for? And why not use the commonly known (and thereby accepted) keyboard shortcuts for general tasks like New, Open, Save, Quit etc., instead of inventing the wheel again from scratch?

I'm sure, there must be great reasons, why Blender does it ALL differently, instead of only doing those things differently, where the world really lacked...

But can anyone tell me why a sophisticated software like Blender lets you exit from a project/the program after working in it for a lenghty period of time without even asking you if you'd like to save your work before quitting?

Because
a) Blender assumes you know what you are doing instead of nagging you to death about each action

b) Blender saves a copy every time you quit - assuming you have your Temp path set properly in the File Paths preferences.

(why not [Ctrl] + S like the rest of the world?)

I assume by 'rest of the world', you mean Microsoft.
Blender began life as an Irix application ( SGI) and started with unixy hot keys. Ctrl-W is Save, Ctrl-S is Save-As.

"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw

Wow. It was an understandable question from a new user. As far as expectations are concerned, it seems pretty standard to have a save dialog when you quit. It's a pretty normal expectation, and even I've gotten into the habit of putting in the quit key combination with the expectation that I'll get a save dialog box, since almost all of my programs do that.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not criticizing blender. I'm just saying that his question was legitimate. And you don't have to jump down his throat for him asking what he has every right to ask.

And you don't have to jump down his throat for him asking what he has every right to ask.

He asked why things are a certain way. I told him. It wasn't intended to be harsh. But I did find the 'three lines of code' thing funny, but that's a rant for another day.

No doubt, to people coming from the Windows world, Blender is a strange animal, especially the UI. But it was designed with a fairly consistent set of concepts. One of those concepts is making things nice for the experienced user as opposed to a lot of hand holding for beginners.

Maya always asks me "do you want to save" if I want to quit, regardless if I just saved or not... My file always seems to be 'dirty' to maya...

Blender does the opposite. It seems to 'think' I know what I'm doing.

Your opinion ( I'll ignore the: "the rest of the world" argument because its a dumb one ) seems to be that your latest version of changes in your file is the best one and thus worth saving...
Blender ( or maya or whatever software ) cannot know this. I might have changed my render settings to 50% to a final check and be more than happy not to find everything rendered at 50% tomorrow morning...

See, the "are you sure" just puts the "should I save this" remembering for me in *my* memory stack. I'm better off remembering to save when I want to save rather then remembering if the state of the file is worth saving at the end of a session...
( note: Blender does ask if I'm sure I want to quit... )

I hope I made it any clear why its better this way, and I think having something better is worth being different for... But I'm aware that's a rather opposing position by itself.

Although Blender has originated from other OS's, this is a valid point.

Users come to a program with expectations - like when they use hotkeys it does something.

Now when I press Ctrl + S in Blender, it does prompt me to save, so why does it not just save the file rather than prompting?

This is one of the bigges annoyances of Blender - saving your work is a fundamental expectation of software so making the excuse that it's because I am a user of such and such an OS is cowardly. If the program is likely to crash, which Blender does quite a lot, then the save mechanism should be intuitive and bullet proof and IMHO should be made to work corresponding to the "accepted way" for the OS it's installed on. As it already responds to Ctrl + S, then the leap should not be too great.

Don't ask me to fix it myself, I have to much animation work to redo because the mechanism is "broken".

I wouldn't say that people who expect Ctrl S (or Command S for OSX) to save automatically are people from a limited remote tribe (cough...Irix..cough). As for cancelling the closing of the window, I am not aware of an OS that doesn't allow catching the exit event (usually cancelling it?) other than mobile or possibly other rare platforms. I'm not sure whether quit.blend is saved in a deconstructor or in an exit event, but if an exit event, couldn't it be interrupted for dialog even if the event can't be cancelled on all platforms? Then you could just ask Yes/No instead of Yes/No/Cancel--That would seem to be a good compromise. I'm sure there could be platform-specific defines if needed. Then have the option in preferences:
[ ] Ask to Save on Exit (checked by default)
--for a complete solution, also do Save All Edited & resolve its issues: http://projects.blender.org/tracker/?fu ... group_id=9 OR Save All Edited & Pack Images on save.

Even if the defaults are the old behavior (all unchecked), it would be great if it were optional especially where Blender is used in a production or educational environment. You could even have an "Overwrite Without Confirming" with same default check state as "Ask to Save on Exit". I have lots of savvy 18yr olds here who are whiz kids at wxPython who still have trouble with Blender (Save on exit, & the tracker issue above). Also, it is a networked environment, where Temp is only saved on the local computer & the users often switch computers & computers sometimes break, losing the local quit file.

stiv wrote:

But can anyone tell me why a sophisticated software like Blender lets you exit from a project/the program after working in it for a lenghty period of time without even asking you if you'd like to save your work before quitting?

Because
a) Blender assumes you know what you are doing instead of nagging you to death about each action

b) Blender saves a copy every time you quit - assuming you have your Temp path set properly in the File Paths preferences.

(why not [Ctrl] + S like the rest of the world?)

I assume by 'rest of the world', you mean Microsoft.
Blender began life as an Irix application ( SGI) and started with unixy hot keys. Ctrl-W is Save, Ctrl-S is Save-As.

"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw

Everything you do can be saved in the document state: resizing windows and changing their layout, changing the 3D view orientation/zoom, which object properties tab you’re looking at— do you want to be nagged about all of that?

I was wondering about that confirmation dialog too. It's very vital for me, because I am a teacher, and my students work with Blender. Sometimes it happens, that a kid is naughty and just presses the Close Blender button on another kid's computer, just for the heck of it. And it just closes without saving! So the poor kid has to do it all over again. Kids don't save the file as often as some people do, because they are not used to do that yet.